May8th

Americans are often mediocre: not the best and not the worst at anything much.

However, they believe they are the best in everything, and they fear they are the worst in everything, so they constantly start shit.

I don't know how it got started, but Trump is our end result.

People have been declaring that Trump isn't going to bring down a country that's been stable for 300 years - this country is 250 years old, not yet 300 - and the American civil war was 150 years ago and literally nearly ended the country. So any optimism about our stability is probably overconfidence.

The response to that is that politics is a pendulum, that it's swung right and will swing left, no big deal here. Well, we can certainly hope this is right - still, WWII was a pretty devastating swing right for those who lived through it, so this lens of a long and comfortable view of history can only mean you have no stake in this right now.

I'm not saying that Trump is literally Hitler - just that he's done nothing to differentiate his morality from Hitler's, not even refusing funding from neo-nazis. So far he's done nothing truly terribly horrible, but also nothing good - and the sheer capriciousness of his appointments bodes badly for anyone forced into contact with the executive branch in any way.

I believe we have a pretty good system politically, but watching Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell literally boast about finding ways to dismantle democracy is weakening my confidence. It's not just Trump, it's every key government position, and not one of them has an ounce of respect for the constitution. A lot of people could die in the next 4 years, if it truly is only 4 years.

The "Muslim" ban is specifically against 7 ethnicities, it doesn't mention religion anywhere. So it doesn't violate the constitution requiremnet for no religious test for entry but rather the 14th amendment against racial descrimination instead. The whole deal with calling and reporting legal immigrants, or arresting immigrants with green cards because they are too brown is explicitly and obviously racial profiling. There's no other reason that legal immigrants are being harassed & arrested.